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Elon Musk, a billionaire who decimated the United States federal workforce using the Department of Government Efficiency, is not remembered fondly by the most powerful woman in Washington: Susie Wiles, White House Chief of Staff and the gatekeeper to President Donald Trump.
In several on-the-record interviews with Vanity Fair’s Chris Whipple conducted over the past year, Wiles, who had corralled the notoriously backstabby Trump political operation into coherence and discipline, described Musk as a “complete solo actor” who had plunged the Trump administration into several unnecessary crises — including the shuttering of USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, which Musk had cut during his DOGE tenure.
“I was initially aghast,” Wiles told Whipple. “Because I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to USAID believed, as I did, that they do very good work.” This week, The Center for Global Development published a report estimating that USAID humanitarian aid cuts could contribute to the deaths of 500,000 to 700,000 individuals a year.
It says a lot about the chaotic 2025 news cycle that the DOGE saga was a minor mention in the wide-ranging, two-part feature which included interviews with Trump’s inner circle, and real-time conversations in the middle of major political crises like the botched release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. But Wiles’s on-the-record assessment of Musk can be viewed as how the administration remembers the Tesla billionaire’s impact — or perhaps damage — to their political agenda:
In his executive order freezing foreign aid, Trump had decreed that lifesaving programs should be spared. Instead, they were shuttered. “When Elon said, ‘We’re doing this,’ he was already into it,” said Wiles. “And that’s probably because he knew it would be horrifying to others. But he decided that it was a better approach to shut it down, fire everybody, shut them out, and then go rebuild. Not the way I would do it.”
According to Wiles, the only immediate patch was to jam USAID into the State Department under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, but even then Musk was obstructive:
Wiles says she called Musk on the carpet. “You can’t just lock people out of their offices,” she recalls telling him. At first, Wiles didn’t grasp the effect that slashing USAID programs would have on humanitarian aid. “I didn’t know a lot about the extent of their grant making.” But with immunizations halted in Africa, lives would be lost. Soon she was getting frantic calls from relief agency heads and former government officials with a dire message: Thousands of lives were in the balance.
Wiles continued: “So Marco is on his way to Panama. We call him and say, ‘You’re Senate-confirmed. You’re going to have to be the custodian, essentially, of [USAID].’ ‘Okay,’ he says.” But Musk forged ahead—all throttle, no brake. “Elon’s attitude is you have to get it done fast. If you’re an incrementalist, you just won’t get your rocket to the moon,” Wiles said. “And so with that attitude, you’re going to break some china. But no rational person could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody.”
It’s rare for a White House chief of staff to be this open and candid while working for the President, even to a journalist who’s written a book about former chiefs of staff. But when it comes to Musk, Wiles seemed willing to be frank. “The challenge with Elon is keeping up with him,” she told Whipple in an interview conducted while Musk was still working in the Trump administration. “He’s an avowed ketamine [user]. And he sleeps in a sleeping bag in the EOB [Executive Office Building] in the daytime. And he’s an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are. You know, it’s not helpful, but he is his own person.”
Whipple recounts later: “When I asked her what she thought of Musk reposting a tweet about public sector workers killing millions under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, she replied: ‘I think that’s when he’s microdosing.’ (She says she doesn’t have first-hand knowledge.)”
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